Thalassa - the world beneath the waves NEW first chapter

This is part of the revised first chapter to the second edition of Thalassa: The World Beneath the Waves. Latest: I'll be running a Kindle Giveaway from March 2nd to March 17th 2018.

Moanna was running out of time.
She pressed her face against the glass of the window, and the endless, everlasting weight of the ocean pressed back. The light was dying. Pale shimmers still filtered down from the poisonous hell at the surface, stirring the sea as they came, but they were no longer unchallenged; the Dark was creeping up from the depths.
How had it got so late?
Moanna left the window at a jog. Past the ladder up into the steering-module, past the family shrine and the staring statue of the Blue Lady, through the hatch into her bedroom. Except calling it a bedroom was at least half a lie: one pace one way, one pace the other, that’s all the actual room there was. Come to think of it, there was no proper bed, either.
Sliding open the glass of her sleep-vault so that she could dress without banging a knee or an elbow, Moanna pulled on her pressure-suit. As she turned to leave she caught the flash of blue eyes in the mirror.
Ultramarine eyes.
She would be fine. She had been out in the ocean at dusk a hundred times before. Darker. Deeper. It wasn’t herself that she was worried about.
Out of her room, really running now, she took the turn to the MANTA-bay. As she passed the statue of the Blue Lady, she gave it a touch. A touch for luck. Not that she believed in the Blue Lady, with her pointed crown and the flaming torch she held high. Most Pioneers prayed to her for protection out in the open ocean, but not Moanna. Not really. Just a silly superstition.
Then down the long central corridor of the H-Pod, through one open hatch after another all the way down to the MANTA-bay. The lights flickered on, and the two MANTAs in their storage-racks stood to attention. Fifteen feet tall, they resembled statues themselves, statues of metal, glass, and plastic, half-human, half-fish, honouring some other ancient Pioneer god of the Deeps.
One of the MANTAs was Moanna’s. The other MANTA had been her brother Jason’s.
Jason Morgan was dead, lost somewhere out in aqua incognita. He had been dead for nearly a year – a long time set against Moanna’s age of fifteen. It still felt sometimes like he would come home. Moanna wondered when that feeling would fade, and whether she really wanted it to.
Nobody quite knew what to do with Jason’s MANTA; it was a reminder of a past stopped short, of a gap in the future. It was another thing to pat as Moanna went by.
She ran past the two empty racks – Moanna’s parents had taken their MANTAs with them to the sea-grass prairies for the harvest – and then she was at the access ladder.
The reflected glare of the lights slid up and over the open bullet-nosed canopy and across her MANTA’s smooth, hydrodynamic body. Moanna checked it over. All the steering-fins looked fine, no weeds or line snagged around them, and the ballast-vents were all clear. Then she unplugged the umbilical-cables and climbed up the ladder. At the top, she ducked under the curving canopy and stepped inside the body. Her legs slotted down until the instrument-displays in the sill came up to her waist – no need anymore for the pedal extensions that she had used as a child.
Moanna strapped herself into the flight-harness and powered up the MANTA’s systems. One by one, they winked online. She tugged the extendable helmet of her pressure-suit out from the high collar behind her head, and with the quick, fluid movement of daily practice, she slid the clear plastic visor down over her face and fastened it at her throat. Then she was good to go.
The hydraulics whined as she pulled down the transparent canopy, slamming it hard and locking it. There was a hiss as the cockpit pressurised. All lights were green. It was time to fly.
Moanna hit the launch button.
“Launch-sequence activated,” a recording of her mom’s voice burbled through the loudspeaker. “I hope you remembered to go to the bathroom.”
Moanna checked the straps of the flight-harness one last time. Behind her MANTA, the in-lock hatch to the launch tube slid open.
“And did you wash your hands?” the recording asked.
Motors growled, and still sitting in its rack, the MANTA rumbled backwards into the vertical launch tube. The hatch closed, sealing Moanna inside.
“Launch in ten seconds,” her mom’s voice said, and the lights in the launch tube started to flash.
Then Moanna heard them all, a chorus of Morgan voices, shouting the countdown together as the water rushed in; her younger, gap-toothed self, her mom and dad, and a barely teenaged Jason, his voice wobbling between high and low. She remembered the day they had made that recording; Jason counting out of order so they had to keep re-doing it, her own fits of giggles, and the horror of hearing what her own voice sounded like.
Blue-green and bubbling, the water climbed rapidly up the strengthened glass of the canopy. Lots of people hated being in a flooding launch tube, but Moanna liked the rising note the water made as it filled the empty space. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, every time.
“Five!” She turned on the MANTA’s flight-lights, and the launch tube blazed white all around her.
“Four!” The Morgans’ recorded voices were muffled mid-word as water flooded the chamber completely.
“Three!” There was a thud and a click and the out-lock hatch above her rotated open.
“Two!” Moanna released the docking-clamps that were pinning her MANTA to the rack.
“One!” A last swirl of silvery bubbles spiralled up past the MANTA, and she hit the thrusters, racing them up the launch tube and out into the ocean.

Up and up the MANTA went, fifteen, twenty, thirty feet above the untidy shape of the Morgans’ H-Pod. Moanna flexed the steering-fins and put the MANTA into a lazy spin. She shifted into. horizontal. flight as she passed back over the out-lock hatch and watched it close automatically beneath her.
Hanging suspended in the flight-harness, she glanced right and left through the bullet-shaped canopy. Deep purple-blue surrounded her, with the silver-white beams of the MANTA’s flight-lights stabbing out ahead. As she circled, she looked along the path they illuminated.
Half a day’s flight to the west were the Morgans’ sea-grass meadows out in the wilds where her parents had been for a week already, and just beyond the meadows, the deep, dark water of the Mississippi Trench. Beyond that, if the old legends were true, the seas eventually ended and the rocky mountains of the Great Plague Deserts pushed their poisonous heads up above the surface. Not far in the opposite direction, behind Moanna, were the Colony’s coral mines, and then hundreds of miles further to the east, more legends: the rising slopes of the Appalachian Islands. North: nothing as far as any Tethyan knew, just aqua incognita, unknown water. Right where the Morgans’ H-Pod sat on its flat coralcrete perch was just about as far beyond the Frontier as any Tethyan had ever dared to settle.
Through the shifting bands of the salt-water currents on Moanna’s left, away to the south, the Colony of MacGillycuddy’s Reef came into view. It was speckled with shimmering lights, sprawling across the rocks and ridges like a massive metal starfish. It had grown so fast in the last few years, unrecognisable from the small hitch-up it had been for most of Moanna’s life, and more changes were coming. If the plans of the politicians in Capital Colony worked out, the Reef would soon become the newest and northernmost member of the ever-expanding Tethys Federation.
Moanna turned towards it.
Strands of twinkling dots moved between the manufacturing and trading sectors as cargo-subs and shuttles approached or left the docks. There was the odd MANTA too, and maintenance-teams flitted like little parasitic fish across the Colony’s jumble of interconnecting pressure-hulls, fixing leaks. Far away in the murk, so distant that its shape was not really visible, was the High Hub, the tower at the centre of those radiating limbs, where people as wealthy and as well-connected as Jenn and Douglas Anderson lived.
Except where was Douglas Anderson now?
Nothing. No lights broke away from the glittering constellation of the Colony and headed in Moanna’s direction.
Dammit! Had Douglas gone on ahead already, looking for her? Maybe. Or was he trying to impress her, waiting to surprise her? That thought almost made Moanna smile. But the Dark was deepening all around her: no place for a dry-walker Colonist to play the daredevil.
“Are you going out to check your lobster traps?” Jenn Anderson had asked her earlier that day, thirty-hours away at the end of a crackling teletalk-line in Capital Colony.
Moanna gave herself a mental kick for being so unguarded. She should have realised what it had meant, that question, so innocent-sounding.
Jenn hated the Andersons’ family visits to Capital Colony, Moanna knew that. Anyone else would have been excited at the thought of a trip down there, to the old, established deepwater Colonies on the edge of the Florida Deeps. But not Jenn. She called Moanna every day, seeking sanctuary from the boredom of endless shopping visits and official engagements, and that day had been no exception.
So Moanna had thought it was a fair question, asking about something that reminded Jenn of her life at home on the ‘wrong’ side of the Frontier.
And then Mrs Anderson had got involved. Moanna knew she had to be worried to consider sending Douglas. Her son had returned from Capital Colony with his father the day before, and as fond as Mrs Anderson was of Moanna, she normally tried to limit any time that Douglas might spend in her company. Just in case.
And Mrs Anderson was worried. Even after five years, she wasn’t used to Frontier life in MacGillycuddy’s Reef. Down in Capital Colony there were miles and miles of fencing and wide areas of carefully managed banks dotted with habitation-condos. Most settlements were linked together by dry-walk connections or tunnel-trains, so that even a trip in a shuttle-sub was regarded as a hazardous inconvenience. Dry-walkers called MANTAs ‘iron coffins’, and for that reason, Mrs Anderson and her husband had never been anywhere near one. Jenn and Douglas had learnt to fly – all part of growing up past the Frontier – but compared to Moanna, they were little more than novices. Just experienced enough to get into trouble…
Now Douglas was out past the Perimeter, sent to baby-sit someone who had spent her entire life out in the Wet! Moanna was annoyed by the arrogance of it – the stupid, well-meaning, dry-walker arrogance.
She couldn’t wait any longer. She flipped her MANTA around in the water, kicked the thrusters to full power, and headed for the Perimeter. She soon passed it – the sentry-pods and the strung-out lines of fluttering weeds that marked the fences, all of it left over from the last Wire War. Further south, on the Federation side of the Frontier, such defences had long since been salvaged. Up on the edge of aqua incognita, where sharks and pirates and who knew what else lurked in the unknown waters, the fences had been kept for safety’s sake.
As she angled her fins away from the Perimeter, Moanna armed the anti-shark spines on her MANTA and looked around warily. But aqua incognita was as empty as ever – just the fish and the flotsam and the restless souls of the billions who had died with the Old Earth more than a thousand years before.
The land rose beneath her, drowned summits that must once have been low hills far from the sea, and the waves at the surface painted broken ribbons across the coral banks.
Moanna glanced up. The surface was so different from the tranquil waters of the Deeps – turbulent and wrathful, a sign of the Hell that people said was beyond them. She stared at the kaleidoscope patterns of greens and blues that furled and furrowed overhead. Only a hundred feet away, but a thousand years of fear and superstition lay between her and the surface.
No-one from the Tethys Colonies had visited the surface for more than a thousand years, and most Tethyans didn’t believe it existed at all. Water all the way up, they said, until you got to Hell itself where the Sun burnt down with its shining rays, peeling the skin from your body, scorching out your eyes, and boiling away the seas to fill what was left with poisonous gasses. Papa Noah had led their ancestors under the waves away from all that. No-one but them, a few thousand at most, had survived the fires and the floods and the toxic winds that had come afterwards from the Great Plague Deserts in the west. The Old Earth had died and a new world had been born: Thalassa, the world beneath the waves. It was Moanna’s world, and she knew it intimately.
As she rounded a saddleback seamount and flew out above the plateau, the waters widened, opening to her sight. Still nothing. No MANTA. Where could Douglas be? There was nowhere to hide out there. Nowhere except…
The knot of fear in Moanna’s stomach tightened, and she headed off at full thrust towards the dusky twilight of the lower slopes.